Dissernet

My new article is now out in University World News, in which I investigate a growing scandal in Tajikistan with a rash of plagiarised doctoral dissertations exposed. Vindicated in this highly embarrassing scandal include high level government officials and senior academics.

Another week, another university league table? Are you getting bored of Buzzfeed-esque listicles? Are you tired of listening to yet another Vice-Chancellor/Provost tell you how well their university has performed in the latest round of classifications?

Then how about this: here’s a league table that I guarantee no university would want to join. I can promise you that you wouldn’t be on the receiving end of a self-congratulatory memo from the Press Office saying what a fantastic achievement this is for the university (although of course we don’t really believe in rankings)…

The league table of fraud

This set of rankings is the result of more than three years of hard work by Russian networking community Dissernet, through a project they have called “Disserpedia” [ru]. The project examined the content of theses at doctoral and post-doctoral* level at 235 institutions and has come up with the top 10 universities in Russia where degrees are most likely to be falsely awarded.

Entry into this insalubrious elite is based on finding five or more instances of fraud. There are no fewer than three categories of deceit:

Plagiarism – unattributed use of other people’s works, or breaching Ministry of Education and Science citation regulations;

Shockingly, the Dissernet researchers found evidence of five or more instances of fraud at nearly 90% of the institutions they investigated (207 out of 235).

The top 10

And without further ado, here is the Disserpedia Top 10 Fraud Factories:

Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow

St Petersburg State University of Economics

Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, Moscow

Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration

Razumovsky Moscow State University of Technologies and Management

Moscow State Automobile and Road Construction University

Moscow State Pedagogical University

Prioksky State University, Oryol

Yevdokimov Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry

Moscow State Institute of International Relations

Note that ALL TEN are state (i.e. publicly funded) institutions… The mind boggles…

Read on to learn more about the methodology to this madness.

How does it work?

On the Disserpedia website (all in Russian), you can search by institution, by location or even by the number of fraudulent instances found thus far. There is also an A-Z listing if you want to search for an individual by name.

I picked a person at random to see what the data analysis looks like. Enter Yuliya Neudakhina, currently Assistant Professor in the State and Muncipal Management Department at Nalchik’s Kabardino-Balkarian State Agricultural University in the Caucasus of southern Russia. Her entry in the Disserpedia first includes information such as what her thesis was on, when she defended it, who her supervisor was, and the composition of the thesis committee.

Then you get to the heart of the fraud. This is a table (screenshot below) showing exactly which parts of the thesis are copied from where. In the schema, grey represents the title page, index and so on that are not included in the analysis. In Neudakhina’s case, four other colours (bright pink, light purple, bright blue and olive green) represent other doctoral theses that she has plagiarised. You can immediately see that the vast majority of her dissertation is simply a cut-and-paste job.

Underneath the schema there are a some additional observations on specific instances of dubious behaviour. For example, one reads: “In copying (in our view) the text of Yelena Zdorova’s dissertation [shown in light purple], Orienburg Region has been replaced by the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic. On page 50 (in our opinion) the region and year has been changed but the rest of the text has been retained. It did read: ‘According to Expert Journal, in 2003 Orienburg Region was ranked 29th based on its innovation potential and 47th place for risk to investors…’. It has become: ‘According to Expert Journal, in 2009 the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic was ranked 29th based on its innovation potential and 47th place for risk to investors…'”.

This is mind-blowing stuff.

*Russia offers two forms of doctoral degree (although is shifting towards to the European three stage certification of Bachelor – Master – PhD). These are “Kandidat Nauk”, which is closest to the PhD, and “Doktor Nauk”, a higher degree similar to the “habilitation” degree awarded in some European countries.